Table of Contents - Zen and the Art of Mission Design

by Jan Griebe, Ph.D.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Defining Missions

Is a story that reveals the difficulties often associated with defining complex missions when multiple partners are involved. It introduces the mission as a key element in the mission system. Likewise, the story reveals the fundamental differences between the concepts of hopes and expectations as applied in the mission process.

Chapter 2 How Missions Connect

Is a story in which the main characters create a winning design for a $500 Million mission. The technical content of this story provides the foundation from which one can develop an enhanced vision of the interconnected process of defining and executing missions.

Chapter 3 Creating the Vision

Is a story that involves creating a vision to support the renewal of a valiant but dying mission. Set in the Rocky Mountains in early spring, the main characters in this story lead a group through the development of an integrated vision using time-line projections and left and right brain integration processes.

Chapter 4 Assessing the Market

Is a story that reveals the difficulty associated with the penetration of an established market. It illustrates the importance of developing clarity of purpose through an assessment of market conditions prior to making a substantial investment in a new venture.

Chapter 5 Achieving Customer Satisfaction

Is a story about a small European manufacturer with plans to establish a manufacturing, distribution, and marketing base in the U.S. It discusses techniques for characterizing the market and for classifying customers in an effort to define logistics associated with reaching a particular market.

Chapter 6 Assessing the Productive Axis

Is a story set at a power plant where three lost-time injuries resulted in the death of one employee. It illustrates how work-place violence can result from subtle shifts in value structures.

Chapter 7 Assessing the Administrative System

Is a story about a woman whose remarkable courage saved her business. It provides a model for an assessment of the administrative system and talks about proactive vs. reactive management styles.

Chapter 8 Assessing the Management System

Is a story about a study performed at a nuclear plant that is experiencing technical difficulties that stem from age related degradation. It demonstrates how seemingly minor maladies in major strategy sets can create significant failures in mission.

Chapter 9 Assessing the Cultural System

Is a story about a mission in transition and the effects that transition had on employees who had been subjected to annual reductions in staff for numerous years. It discusses the formation of culture, including the influences of environmental terms and conditions and how these are codified in terms of values and processed through various neurological and psychological programs.

Chapter 10 Problem-Solving Diagnostics

Is a story about a management assessment conducted to determine why irradiated test samples critical to defining safety margins had been removed from a reactor for more three years but had not been analyzed.

Chapter 11 Mission Continuity

Is a story about a mission whose costs were out of control. It is set in a time when the nuclear industry was in transition. It shows how minor shifts in the continuity of the mission system impact the mission’s value structures and the effects those shifts can impose on both the mission and the people who support it.

Chapter 12 Functional Analysis

Is a story about an assertive executive who takes a position as a Vice President at a nuclear plant where gradual shifts in values have created opportunities for fraud. It discusses the process for conducting and documenting a functional study and illustrates how this type of analysis can be used to uncover underlying issues.

Chapter 13 Business Flow Analysis

Is story about an analysis of a complex work-flow process. It uses as its backdrop a setting in which a government laboratory had recently experienced accidental deaths of three employees. It provides a mechanism through which the flow of business can be traced through an organization.

Chapter 14 Critical Task Analysis

Is a story about an executive new to his assignment who is being stonewalled by one his managers. It contains two models, one that discusses the structure of strategy and another that provides a mechanism for assessing critical skills.

Chapter 15 Value Integration Analysis

Is a story in which a dysfunctional employee threatens the security of an executive. From a technical standpoint, it explores a method for integrating values into an existing structure, which in the end proves to be the forerunner to the self-assessment process.

Chapter 16 Transition Planning

Is a story in which a dynamic analysis of a mission in transition reveals a strategy that threatens the success of the mission. Set in a community system it shows how mission systems sometime protect their offenders at the expense of the mission.

Chapter 17 Design Alternatives

Is a story of a businessman who is concerned about his ability to compete in the new Internet market. It illustrates how designs for innovation and diversification can be used to create new and better business opportunities for small and medium sized businesses.

Chapter 18 Creating Hierarchy

Is a story that draws upon the personal experiences of the primary characters in their pursuit of humane options for executing downsizing processes.

Chapter 19 Job Design

Is a story about a woman undergoing transition during a time when life’s demands are sometimes more than she can accommodate. This story tells how work, logistics, and values create a structure through which individual identity can be achieved.

Chapter 20 Staffing

Is a story that explores the main character’s background revealing how and why she became a consultant. It is also a story about friendship as two characters work together to deliver training that focuses on the teaching of proper staffing techniques.

Chapter 21 Leadership

Is a story of leadership presented through the use of metaphor. It leaves the reader with the question, ‘What type of leader am I?’

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